The health care reform law gives federal health officials a new mandate to address the fact that racial and ethnic minorities tend to be sicker than the rest of the population.

But there are limits to what they can actually do about the problem. The root causes, public health experts say, are social forces such as poverty, poor schools and crumbling infrastructure that are outside the control of the Department of Health and Human Services.

While there are some things HHS can do to improve minorities’ access to quality health care, broadly addressing health disparities requires the department “to lead in areas where [it has] no authority,” said James Marks, senior vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The size of America’s health disparities is captured by some shocking statistics.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-American babies die almost 2½ times as often as white babies in the United States; poor children are 43 percent more likely to have asthma than their better-off peers; and people without a high school diploma are almost twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who have more than a high school education.

The state of the health care system has contributed to these gaps, many experts on health care disparities say, and the reform law includes features that are intended to address them.

Expanding Medicaid and subsidized private insurance will provide coverage for millions of poor and minority Americans, they say — populations that are especially likely to be uninsured today. Improving the way doctors and hospitals deliver care may help, too, since research shows these groups are far less likely to get high-quality care when they do see a doctor.

On Monday, HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Howard Koh announced new final standards for measuring race, ethnicity, primary language and other characteristics in order to better track disparities and target interventions in the health care system. He also unveiled a set of health priorities known as “leading health indicators,” which include education levels as a measure of the country’s well-being.

But while such measures are important, said Steven Woolf, a physician who directs the Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Human Needs, “the lion’s share of the task is outside of health care.”

HHS has built on its mandate from the Affordable Care Act to expand collaboration with other departments to address health care disparities, including crafting an “action plan” and a strategy for public engagement. It also invested broadly in prevention, creating a $15 billion Prevention and Public Health Fund that public health researchers believe can especially benefit vulnerable populations while improving the nation’s health across the board.

But Jonathan Fielding, the public health director for Los Angeles County, whom President Barack Obama appointed to a panel advising HHS on prevention policy, said there may be a more effective way to improve health.

“If there was one thing you could do to improve health,” he said, it would be to “address the [high school] dropout rate.”

Improving education is a “wholesale strategy,” Fielding said, that addresses several health risk factors. It leads to better jobs that are more likely to offer health insurance, better housing that is less likely to be near sources of pollution and is closer to grocery stores with healthy food and greater health literacy so people know how to care for themselves.

“It’s not a panacea, [but] you press a single button and a number of indicators move in the right direction,” he said.

That’s not a universally shared view, though. The Heritage Foundation’s Ed Haislmaier is skeptical about whether government interventions can do much about disparities, especially since, he argues, so many of them come down to individual decisions on issues like what to eat and whether to exercise.

He also doubts that expanding coverage will have an impact because Medicaid’s low payments to doctors might make it hard for patients to actually get care.

“There’s only so much that you can do through the public health system and even social engineering outside of health care,” Haislmaier said. “There’s this kind of presumption if we just had better circumstances, people would be better. I think that’s way overblown.”

But there are studies that suggest interventions in inequality outside of health care could not only save many lives but also take a huge bite out of health costs.

A review of mortality data by a team that included Adam Karpati, executive deputy commissioner of New York City’s health department, found that in 2000, 245,000 people without high school diplomas died who most likely would have lived if they had at least finished school. That is 52,000 more people than the number of those who died that year of a heart attack, which was then the leading cause of death.

Another study, led by the CDC’s Bobby Milstein, showed that behavioral and environmental interventions saved 4.5 million lives and $596 billion over a 25-year period. Providing universal health insurance coverage, by contrast, would save only 800,000 lives and increased health spending by $1.5 trillion.

Does that mean lawmakers who are looking for ways to slow health spending would be better off putting money in the Department of Education than HHS?

“I actually think the good news is those kinds of choices don’t have to be made,” said Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink, a think tank on inequality. If other departments embrace health priorities, she said, they can make policy that leverages their existing resources to improve health.

But that may not be so easy given that other departments have their own priorities and constituencies, as do their appropriators.

Asked about this challenge, Koh said the department is taking “a much more community-based approach” to working with city governments and nonprofits to align education, housing and food policies at the local level.

It is not entirely clear how much support the HHS initiatives have from the White House. Obama proposed cutting $3.5 billion of the Prevention and Public Health Fund in his September deficit-reduction proposal. The administration also agreed as part of an April budget deal to a $600 million funding cut for community health centers that serve a largely low-income population.

Marks also said these resources will need special protection as the supercommittee attempts to close a deal because they are believed to be possible sources of savings.